I screwed up. I usually run “Best Christmas Ads” on the Sunday between Black Friday and Cyber Monday but simply forgot this year. Possibly because nobody makes really good Christmas ads anymore. “Woke” and Christmas just doesn’t seem a natural pairing, but still the agencies try; producing such fare as this John Lewis and Partners commercial that morphs the now mandatory inter-racial hook-up into an inter-species encounter where an albino alien meets up with a little earthbound gingerbread man.
Screenshot from John Lewis and Partners Christmas 2021 ad
Now John Lewis is a British company, but even the Brits seem to have lost their way with Christmas. They once had some of the best “adverts” as they call them across the pond. Especially loved were the Christmas Heathrow Bears who starred in an annual ad for, of all things, an airport - an entity one seldom thinks of as requiring promotion. This was one of their best, from 2017, illustrating the arch of the Bears lives via visits to the airport.
Sadly the bears were retired with the 2018 advert, possibly because even the fantasy of commercials could no longer make air travel appear the least bit appealing. Don’t look for them to be back anytime soon either, as the arrival of the Wuhan Cooties – thank you China, you godless, evil tyrant – has made flight even more unbearable (no pun intended). This was the last Heathrow offering, from 2018:
I fear Americans gave up on Christmas ads years ago. Madison Avenue simply lost their sparkle now that ad agencies are run and staffed by woke, tech-oriented, humorless Millennials. The joyless generation, convinced the earth is dying, has even sucked the fun out of Christmas. Yet there was a time not so long ago when even Coke wasn’t ashamed of America – or Christmas.
This year Coke gives us this multi-culti “holiday” ad instead. It doesn’t even sound festive. Such is the lot of the Woke.
So unless you can prove me wrong we’ll have to be satisfied with recycled Christmas ads until such time as we regain our senses and free ourselves of the Ever-Wokes.
Posts
